[jason_zielke]

I completely agree with you Dave. I think your suggestion is a good solution to the problem.

At the very least, there needs to be some limit to the penalty such as disabiling the robot if they violate this rule more than X number of times in a match.

The excitement of the students and the fans goes down significantly when a team loses because a robot on the alliance causes 50 points in penalties after the others alliance mebers scored 40 points to win the game. It makes qualification matches much more about getting with teams that just don't mess up.

To comment on a few of the other opinions expressed, the idea that you need to "plan" better about crossing the line is really not fair since all the other robots in the quadrant have the ability to backup into you, thus giving you no place to go. Though this could be a good form of defense, I do not think it is the intent of the rule FIRST was hoping to achieve. They need to allow a team to not be trapped in a part of the field because another robot backs up to block them. I would assume that a referre would call this impeding traffic according to the rules, but I have not seen this happen and doubt it would because it is not very obvious in game play.

I hope that after the first week of competition, the game design committee will consider changing this rule to really allow this game to be exciting like they (and all the rest of us) had hoped for.